Reaching the bubble may not be enough: news media role in online political polarization
Politics in different countries show diverse degrees of polarization, which tends to be stronger on social media, given how easy it became to connect and engage with like-minded individuals on the web. A way of reducing polarization would be by distributing cross-partisan news among individuals with...
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Zusammenfassung: | Politics in different countries show diverse degrees of polarization, which
tends to be stronger on social media, given how easy it became to connect and
engage with like-minded individuals on the web. A way of reducing polarization
would be by distributing cross-partisan news among individuals with distinct
political orientations, i.e., ``reaching the bubbles''. This study investigates
whether this holds in the context of nationwide elections in Brazil and Canada.
We collected politics-related tweets shared during the 2018 Brazilian
presidential election and the 2019 Canadian federal election. Next, we proposed
an updated centrality metric that enables identifying highly central bubble
reachers, nodes that can distribute content among users with diverging
political opinions - a fundamental metric for the proposed study. After that,
we analyzed how users engage with news content shared by bubble reachers, its
source, and its topics, considering its political orientation. Among other
results, we found that, even though news media disseminate content that
interests different sides of the political spectrum, users tend to engage
considerably more with content that aligns with their political orientation,
regardless of the topic. |
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DOI: | 10.48550/arxiv.2109.08906 |